Lifting his head
To taste the dark–
Multifoliate.
The rose is shrunken
Inward on the stem.
The grass is wet.
Over and over
I tell myself:
Selfishness is
The first great sin.
Archive for the 'Naomi' Category
Fingers laced and locked
Like the teeth of a cat
She stares at the door.
Hour by hour
In the blind dark
The opossum hangs
From the dogwood.
A proliferance of joints
Clicking like clock gears
Spinning in slow motion,
Fast as a cat.
An assemblage of legs
Ending in pinpricks
Or snowflakes.
My feet are not there
and my ankles are lonely,
cut off at the joints, the fine threads
dangling uselessly, flicking
The tops of trees, if there
were trees to flick
birds into the sky
(they do not fly themselves)
They are a lonely shape
in vain. They must be pushed
from the nest to fall on their faces.
But we all have the same face.
It is blue and it is cold. It is
the night face at the window.
And it is the same face inside
and looking out.
I pass the mural on the seawall.
It has faded into streaks of green.
I tighten my collar against the wind.
Tracing the cracks with my fingers,
I feel nervous in the uncertain light.
I keep walking, stepping over garbage,
Clumps of algae, tangles of wire.
I pass the pier where men
Cast lines for catfish, the sun sinking,
The first of them leaving, shaking their heads.
I am a trilobite.
Or, the hollow shape of a trilobite
Engraved, a prisoner in patterned shale.
I have become limestone.
I have become a picture in a science book,
An image clicking through a set of slides—
The State Fossil of Pennsylvania.
Is such fame, such reknown, a triumph?
Am I trampled in the mud? Crystallised
In a bituminous vein.
So for lack of anything better to post, I’m going to put up some of the products of in-class exercises—or the exercises I do with my writing friends. Feel free to dislike anything, or like anything, or to do anything, or to not do anything.
I liked writing on this thing better before people actually read it. Now I’m self-conscious about my posts (which is why there haven’t been any). Will I be held responsible for what I say?
I’m feeling inspecific lately, like a balloon in space. I think the best thing to do in that case is to write (using a pen with a thick, inky line) lists of very specific things, that exist in a certain place, at a certain time, in a certain way. And then orient the self, according to those points of reference, in the particular.
As I am typing, I am observing the veins in my hands, which are almost transparent in this light. I like seeing my veins, I always appreciate evidence of my circulatory system. It’s reassuring to know that I am full of wires and tunnels, it makes me feel less vague about things.
When I was eleven, a year before I became vegetarian, I was eating a piece of chicken and a vein slipped out of it. It had lost its color and was like a piece of rubber tubing. It was stretchy.
As blood is supplied to every cell in the body—especially the muscles, I wonder how many capillaries and vessels the average meat-eater consumes…laid end to end, how far would they go?
So Nathan remarked that my recent posts have been a little emo. And he is right. I apologize.
I guess if you don’t have anything uplifting to say, you should keep your thoughts to yourself and not drag other people down into your sad and bitter world. I’ve been low on creativity lately, but I don’t believe in not working just because you’re out of ideas. Even though I’m busy with finals, I’m forcing myself to write for about an hour each day. I think if you don’t maintain your practice daily, your work loses its focus and becomes dull and weak. You lose confidence and it shows. So anyway, if I come up with anything interesting I’ll post it here, otherwise I’ll try to keep quiet until I have something nice to say.
Latest Comments